Understanding the people you're marketing to is crucial. If you understand who they are, what they need and what may be interesting to them, it will be a lot easier to create a message that will resonate with them. In the previous video, we discussed water target audiences. In this video, you'll learn how to define your target audience using a template that will guide your marketing. Your target audience is a group of people with similar characteristics that you believe will have an interest in your product. It's a good idea to describe your target audience in as much detail as possible. It'll help you down the road when you are creating your marketing messages. Here's a templates you can use to do this. This template was designed with Social Media Marketing in mind. You'll see later that the different categories in this target audience template correspond to different decisions you'll make when you create a marketing campaign. Let's take a look. You start by describing the needs your target audience has that you know, your product or service can help them with. Remember Kylar and Ivy the flower business. When Imran thought about a need for her primary target audience, she describes it as follows. A need to beautify a space. It's a simple yet core needs that she felt many of our customers expressed when they came to her store. They would talk about how they needed a nice bouquet to spruce up the living room to bring them enjoyment or because they had visitors coming over. They had different reasons, but she felt that it always came down to this specific need. They wanted to beautify a space. Then it's a good idea to write down the demographics of the people you're targeting. You can think about their age, gender, household, income, education and or occupation and where they live. Imran used to following demographics for her primary target audience. Women between 30 and 55 years old, some higher education who live in Dutch metropolitan areas. Next, you should reflect on what your prospective customers are typically interested in. Here we don't mean that they're interested in your product. You want to describe some interests that people in your audience having common. It will help you later on to decide where to find your audience and how to appeal to them. For instance, for Kylar and Ivy, Imran knows that our audience has an interest in interior design, fashion and sustainable living. Finally, it helps to describe some common behaviors among your target audience. It's good to especially reflect on their media consumption. For instance, which websites today visit, which magazines do they like to read and so on. Kylar and Ivy's target audience browsers, interior design websites and magazines. They also like to follow a few well-known Dutch lifestyle bloggers and they enjoy yoga, the outdoors and entertaining friends. Finally, you can give your target audience a name and if you like, you can even add an image. Marketers will often picture a typical consumers. One day really believe exemplifies the audience they are trying to reach the username and image that reminds them of other typical target customer might look like. This type of profile of a typical target customer is often referred to as a target persona. In this example for Kylar and Ivy, we could refer to our target persona as Monique. We can use this image to refer to her. Having a target persona like this with a name and an image often helps people in a company when they are communicating within their teams. It helps to make sure everyone can picture who the audience is there planning to market to. Imran at Kylar and Ivy learned about her target audience through her interactions with customers at her store in Rotterdam. She got to know them by talking to them day in, day out. But what if you don't have store? How do you define your target audience? How do you get to know who they are, what their needs are, their interests and how they behave. That's where research comes in. Companies will use different types of research to establish a better understanding of their target audience. Larger companies may rely on larger qualitative or quantitative studies. Qualitative research is research that relies on less structured observations. It could be in-person interviews or focus groups, or field research where researchers observe how people interact with their products for instance. Quantitative studies are more structured and typically rely on questionnaires or data resulting from the behavior of many people. Large companies will often hire research agencies to help them with these studies. They will then focus on understanding users of their products, of the competitors' products and how the products fit in their lives. But even if you don't work for a large company or if you don't have the budgets to hire a research agency to help you better understand who your target audiences. There are several steps you can take to get a better picture of your target audience. First, start with your current customers. Specifically, those that buy the products or services, your marketing efforts are focused on. Think about the characteristics they have in common and brainstorm with your team to describe them. You may even have some sales data to help you. In case you're already active on social media and you have a company profile or accounts on some platforms. Checkout who the audiences that follows you or that likes your brand. Second, monitor your competition. Get a sense of how they communicate and where they are talking. Are there particular social channels they're active in? Do they seem to target certain audiences? A bit of exploring to understand their strategy can help you understand the audience they go after and define your own target audience better. Finally, talk to customers, friends and even strangers that may be interested in your product. Don't be shy. People often like to tell you more about the products and the brands they like. Let's look at one more example. James at DCB Cleaning is working on his social media marketing campaign for snack wall. The snack supply service to companies introducing for small and medium-sized businesses that already use DCB cleaning services. The goal for James, his campaign is to enroll 25 percent of the DCB cleaning clients in snack wall within six months. James is starting to think through the message for his campaign and he takes a moment to write down the target audience. He has a clear image of who the message goes to. In terms of demographics, James is targeting an audience that's typically between 40 and 55 years old, mostly male, highly educated and in a managerial role. The DCB clients are mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. James is modeling this largely after the current client base of DCB cleaning, since his goal is to attract clients to snack wall. To further characterize his target audience in terms of interests and behavior, James sent out a short questionnaire to current customers of DCB cleaning in which he asked them whether or not they were interested in providing free snacks to their team? He also asked questions about the type of business declined was part of? Based on the answers and the client profiles James had access to, he completed a target audience templates as follows. In terms of interest, James believes that his potential clients are interested in startup culture, workplace wellness and employee benefits. In terms of behavior, he characterizes his audience as reading tech news publications, craft coffee aficionados and focused on networking. He also found that his targets is active on Reddit. James then pictured a fictitious person to represent his target. He added this picture and he called the persona Venturing Jim. With this image in mind, James starts to reflect on his campaign and he uses this information to discuss his plans with his intern, it helps them to brainstorm what messages might appeal to Venturing Jim, clearly defining your target audience is an important step in your marketing preparations. It pays off to take some time to reflect on your target audience. We discussed how research can help you to better define what your target audience looks like. Next you'll find some tips on tools you can use to conduct that research.
